Place and Time

Otherwise known as Setting. It's one of the [many] things I struggle with. The basics of an opening to a story needs to make clear the Who is Where and When, Why they're there (maybe just a hint), and What they're doing. This post is about the Where and When of a story. The place …

Summary Tell, or Interactive Show?

It's that old conundrum of show versus tell. Every story has summary, every story has immediacy, but they don't usually end up in the same paragraph. There are reasons for that. A tell is summarising something, a conclusion made, or an unmoving description (static, unattached to a character). There are several ways to tell. Summarising …

And Then There was the … Synopsis

What -- you do it first? I don't, and there's a reason for that. It's not that I do things back to front, at least not from my perspective. The start is the beat sheets, one for each character in the story, but the main two characters (usually the main character/protagonist and the antagonist) get …

What comes after?

Remember the story process posts (combined post here)? Well, that was just the start! What happens next? The next level down for a story plan (yes, it's a real plan, but not a synopsis or outline -- this is a process, my process): Scene Outlines What is a scene outline? This is a bit like …

It’s All In The Point of View

Or POV, as we more often say. This is a story, a personal rendition of how I learned how to understand POV. It's told from my perspective, so it's in First Person POV. No, I'm not going to talk about tenses. That's a different matter altogether, and POV is tough enough to get right without …

Chit, Chat without Context

The writerly term is talking heads syndrome. What does it mean? Dialogue happens, but there's nothing there, no sense of the where for setting, nor grounding of context or situation. Dialogue can be great, but if there's no world setting, no place for it to happen, the mouthpieces can be set on a piece of …

What’s a Plot?

For all of us, eventually, it's where we go after 'the end' but that's not the plot I want to talk about here. Plot in a story is about the events that lead from one to the next until 'the end' for the snippet of this [main] character's life. If the events don't lead from …

Make it Easy on the Reader

The new story is up on pre-order, and I tried to take all the advice for making it easy on the reader. I'm not talking only the words that make up the story -- there's a ton of other stuff. For example, I put the blurb/description as part of the eBook these days. This is …

The Story Process Posts From Go to Whoa

And it's cos Marina asked -- so blame her! Anyway, in case you wanted to read the whole gamut (approx 5k words) of posts (all written on the spur of the moment, off the cuff, so any errors are stuck there now), here they are in one post: An Idea It’s been on the backburner …